Reclamation is a documentary-style imagining of a post-dystopian future in Canada after massive climate change, wars, pollution, and the after-effects of the large-scale colonial project which has now destroyed the land. When Indigenous people are left behind after a massive exodus by primarily privileged white settlers who have moved to Mars, the original inhabitants of the land cope by trying to restore and rehabilitate the beautiful planet they belong to.

Eiko edited this video to illuminate, in fast pace, her solo performance project A Body in Places. The red cloth she often uses in her performance is used as a visual link between different places and communities where Eiko performed.

The seemingly groundless debate as to whether a river is "riley" or "roily" can be interpreted as an example of language's descriptive failure. A shouting match over how to describe the river has no effect; the face of nature continues unchanged. Riley, Roily, River graphically illustrates the gap of meaning that exists between the natural, empirical world and the language we use to describe it.

This is the ritual consecration to the moon, on whose eroded surface the colorful blood of the fruits is poured, which is also our pulsating blood disseminated in the celestial body of the moon. Sparkling bleeding body that crosses the dark space of our present times. Part of the Lunar Films series.

“Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship with others.”

-- Graham Harvey, Animism

Trance dance and water implosion, a kino-line drawn between secular freak-outs and religious phenomena. Filmed in a single take at a sacred site on the Upper Suriname River, the minor secrets of a Saramaccan animist's everyday are revealed as time itself is undone. Rites are the new Trypps -- embodiment is our eternal everything.

Filmed during a trip sponsored by UCLA CAPS in 2019.

Camera by Alexis Moh.
Edited by Eiko Otake.

In Rotten Apples, George Kuchar explores the themes of life, lust, decay and death, all through the act of grinding apples for cider. As Kuchar walks around an orchard with his friends in an attempt to enjoy the natural beauty of their surroundings, his creeping hand gestures make it clear that the threat of destruction is always looming. However, this destruction can also be understood as the simple transformation of a thing’s physical state.

This video was originally created to be used as a projection in a performance of Bodies on March 29, 2019. DonChristian Jones and Eiko performed Bodies at the public plaza in front of Columbia University's Lenfest Center for the Arts on 125th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive. The footage was shot at the same location days prior to the performance. Eiko re-edited the piece in May 2020.

Camera and edit by Eiko Otake.
The footage of Eiko's performance was shot by Alexis Moh and Sumie Yonei.

A meditation on maritime trade routes, SEA – SHIPPING – SUN is a short film directed by Tiffany Sia (b. Hong Kong) and Yuri Pattison (b. Dublin) shot over the span of two years to render a simulated duration of a day, beginning at twilight and closing at sunset. The film is set against shipping forecasts from archival BBC Radio 4 broadcasts. The sun emerges and disappears, again and again.

A meditation on maritime trade routes, SEA – SHIPPING – SUN is a short film directed by Tiffany Sia (b. Hong Kong) and Yuri Pattison (b. Dublin) shot over the span of two years to render a simulated duration of a day, beginning at twilight and closing at sunset. The film is set against shipping forecasts from archival BBC Radio 4 broadcasts. The sun emerges and disappears, again and again.

Originally part of a larger sculptural installation using prospector's tools, this tape reenacts the search for "Olga," a miner's wife who disappeared on her honeymoon in 1936. As Paul and Marlene Kos call out, "Olga... Olga...", the camera scans the Wyoming wilderness, and their search becomes ritualistic, the repetitive calls building in intensity and breaking down into chanted moans.

Waves crash on rocks as tongues flap in the wind about all things cinematic. People chirp and chew in various states of dress and undress as the climate shifts from coast to coast on the tide of a national pleasure/treasure: film festivals, lectures and art happenings.

Charles Simonds (b.1945) majored in art at the University of California at Berkeley. There he discovered an area of clay pits that had once provided the raw material for some of Manhattan's older buildings. He literally immersed himself in the subject, burying himself in a pool of wet clay to get a feel for the material. Simonds's sculptures are enchanting architectural minatures. Most are landforms with small chambers and towers; some are abstract organic shapes. Carefully built brick by tiny brick, Simonds's sculptures engage the child in everyone.

The first video work created collaboratively with DonChristian Jones as a part of Eiko's The Duet Project: Distance is Malleable. The video was projected as part of The Value of Sanctuary: Building a House Without Walls exhibition at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2019.

Performed by Eiko Otake and DonChristian.
Camera by DonChristian Jones, Inci Eviner, Merián Soto.
Edited by Eiko Otake.
Created during the 2017 Rauschenberg Residency for The Duet Project.

"In Some Dark Place, filmmaker Cecelia Condit explores the dislocations of identity and memory that aging forces upon us, without losing sight of life's beauty."

— Milwaukee Film Festival, 2016

"I have always explored the eerie, dark side of human nature."

— Cecelia Condit

Rosa Barba produced a science fiction film based on interviews with local residents and individuals involved in the land suppletion project for Maasvlakte 2. Barba asked the interviewees to imagine what this new land could look like in the future. While we see images of the new land, the slufter: a storage reservoir for heavily contaminated sludge from the new Meuse river, the construction of the huge docksides, basalt blocks, empty containers and the mechanical movements of the transhipment process, we listen to a story apparently taking place in the future.

The Spender House in Essex was designed in 1968 by Richard and Su Rogers (Team 4) for photographer and artist Humphrey Spender. The film is a biographical portrait of both architecture and inhabitant.

Spender died in 2005 but his spirit is still very present in the house and studio. The film explores the unique architectural qualities of the house and studio and provides a glimpse of its former inhabitant’s life and work as a painter, textile designer and photographer of British life in the 1930s for Mass Observation.

A minimal, suggestive narrative about a summer trip to the Jersey Shore, fictionalized by subtraction. The film combines still photos, moving image, and precise sound design with barely perceptible animation to create a subliminal effect, and an ambivalence about what's remembered and what's imagined.

— Liza Bear

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. Dani and Sheilah collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling.

Strangely Ordinary This Devotion is a visceral exploration of feral domesticity, queer desire, and fantasy in a world under the threat of climate change. Utilizing and exploding archetypes, the film offers a radical approach to collaboration and the conception of family. Dani and Sheilah collect and arrange images and moments that are at once peculiar and banal, precious and disturbing, creating resonance and contrast through experimental modes of storytelling.

Appealing concurrently in this video essay to various meanings of the term “Subatlantic” — a climatic phase beginning 2,500 years ago, as well as the submerged regions of the Atlantic — Biemann immerses her camera deep in oceanic waters to ponder upon the entanglements of geological time with that of human history.

Strap on your seat belts and get comfortable for a 7,000 mile drive. This documentary invites you to travel along with the Center for Land Use Interpretation as they find suggested photo spots across North America. Journey from coast to coast, stopping long enough to take snap shots of unusual or exemplary land use sites across North America. You will even get to take a picture of Kodak's own waste water treatment plant in Rochester, New York.

Sunday, 6th April 11:42 a.m. is a video about landscape as a complex network of connections that guide relationships between people. It is a video that focuses on the relationships between actions and places, movements and the environment as well as the trajectories which the place itself creates. The video underlines the reciprocal connection between environment and its inhabitants, because territory plays an inevitable role in its anthropomorphic transformations.

-- Flatform

Tales of a Future Past is a video about a giraffe and a zebra who fight over an undefined baby creature, in hopes of making it one of their own species. Using toy masks and a sparse theatricality, Cecelia Condit creates a contemporary reflection on species extinction and the lonely, silent world that will ensue from it.